High School Art Lesson Plans
created by Tamara Filas
(also suitable for Middle School)
Level 3
Click here if you haven't seen level 1.
Click here if you haven't seen level 2.
Unit 1: Still Life in Charcoal with Texture
Students learned how to tell the textures of objects by the way in which the light reflects. This helped them to draw a still-life in charcoal pencils that had at least three different textures present.
Textural Object Drawings Project Sheet
Textural Object Drawings Assessment Sheet
Textural Still-Life Drawing Project Sheet
Textural Still-Life Drawing Assessment Sheet
Student Artwork (object drawings and final still lifes):
Unit 2: Watercolor Painting
Before beginning their final painting, students were taught the basics of watercolor painting through a series of short activities. The entire unit is presented below.
Introduction to Watercolor Text
Introduction to Watercolor Reading Questions
Watercolor Final Project Sheet
Student Artwork:
Unit 3: Pysanky --- the art of Ukrainian Egg Dyeing
This unit involved the creation of two designed eggs. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of student work, but if you would like to see some examples of this art form, you can look at some of my own pysanky.
History of Pysanky Reading Questions
Unit 4: Textural Acrylic Painting
Students learned of ways to create texture in an acrylic painting such as through brush strokes, collage, decalcomania, frottage and grattage. Unfortunately, the files for this unit have been lost, but I can at least show some of the student artwork from this unit. The requirements were to show at least three textures in the final painting.
Student Artwork:
Here you can see the drumsticks, hair, eyebrows and strings on the right side
are all real, three-dimensional objects that were attached to the canvas.
This artist attached "clothes" cut from fabric, hangers made from
paperclips and a real flower for the "painting" hanging on the wall.
This portrait of Shrek shows him wearing a vest made of indoor/outdoor
carpeting. Different brush strokes were used to create the background and
two types of fur on the donkey.
This "Dumb and Dumber" painting achieves the look of varied textures
through differing brush stroke techniques.
Level 4 --- Independent Study
A couple of my students chose to help decorate the walls of the art room for their independent study project. They knew how much I loved music, so they definitely chose some appropriate subject matter. Included were Elvis Presley, Jack White, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia, Frank Zappa and Bob Dylan. For the following school year, I was needed at the middle school, so I didn't get to enjoy the murals for very long. For 2005-2006, I was transferred back to this very room, so I got to see them all the time. My assistant in 2006 added a third mural underneath the whiteboard.
Sadly, over the summer in 2010, someone in the school district made the heartless decision to cover all three murals over in white paint, destroying literally hundreds of hours of student work. I'll never forget my first day back to school in the fall of 2010: The teacher in-service, held before students returned to school, was designed so that different teachers attended their lessons in multiple pre-arranged classrooms. The first classroom on my schedule was my old art room. Walking into that room and seeing the bleak, white walls, knowing my students' beautiful murals were gone forever, was so difficult. I fought the whole day to hold back my tears. In stark contrast, the primary art teacher's room maintained murals from numerous years past. Almost every surface in that room was painted with student work, including the cabinetry and ceiling tiles. Students really enjoyed coming back to visit the school after they had graduated to see that their artwork was still there, inspiring other students. The only time old students' work was painted over in that classroom was to provide space for a new independent study student's work, as the room only had so many paintable surfaces. There was no justifiable reason that my students' murals needed to be painted over since most of my old art room was a blank white canvas, with the exception of the three student murals photographed below.
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